Exhibition Essay

What Lies in the Bush and Lingers in The Trees

written by Gervais Marsh

Leasho Johnson’s solo exhibition A Deep Haunting at TERN gallery in Nassau, Bahamas reveals a new suite of paintings, some of which are a continuation of his Anansi series, which he began 3 years ago, along with several other works that can be identified as part of Johnson’s signature portrait style.

A macabre presence, the portrait compositions are inspired by people and experiences from Johnson’s life, abstracted into the emotional residues from his encounters with them. More confrontational than imaginative, each portrait delves into the psyche and insists on a more introspective response. In the piece, A Deep Haunting, from which the exhibition draws its title, a profound blue-black creates an abyss that extends beyond the canvas. Quietly coming undone from within, other colours are exposed through the cut-outs. The amorphous silhouettes are accentuated by caricature-like features: from the bright lips in Who knew his speech and silence..." to the exaggerated mouth in Shut you mouth...with you little bit a money, they emit a monstrous humour, assembled in the gallery like onlookers peering both at visitors and through the bush of the larger Anansi landscape paintings.

On the river, pon di bank (Anansi #11) is one of the new landscape works. Like dry grass under a hot summer sun after weeks of no rain, a sombre brown-grey fills the canvas. The fluidity of the watercolour shapes the landscape, bleeding into faint hints of red, blue, and purple and contrasting with the deep charcoal black of the figures drawn at the centre of the image. Tightly embraced, the limbs of each body cannot be distinguished. It is that intimacy of not knowing where one body ends and another begins. A motorcycle wheel lies in the bottom left corner, a getaway vehicle if necessary. The chorus of Blak Ryno’s Dancehall track “Bike Back” fills my ears, “Pon da bike yah, hold on tight pon di bike back”. There is a solidity to the black pigment Johnson uses to create his figures that emphasizes embodiment, a testament to the rich interior lives that are impenetrable to the outside gaze.

Johnson has described his Anansi series as an exploration into the “psychological space for Black queer love” and considers the complexities that shape those intimacies. This work is situated within the context of Jamaican society, which is marked both by a prevalence of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments, often tied to religious doctrine, and the pulse of different forms of queer life, which reconfigure spaces to experience pleasure and build relationships. Employing abstract expressionism, Johnson’s paintings hold shifting articulations of the self, as a recognition of the multiplicity we each possess. The pieces depict visual and affective experiences that exceed language, embracing illegibility to affirm that which cannot and perhaps does not need to be described. Caribbean people are too often overdetermined by labels, viewed as hyper-sexual, homophobic and politically backwards, terms that are both racialized and classed.

In the Anansi paintings, abstraction expands gender and sexuality beyond classification through an embrace of potential, all the ways it could be and is. This reflects Caribbean ways of being with the belief that who we are or what we know is not fixed, and rather always in process. In her essay, “The Politics of Abstraction” queer feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer writes, “I have deeper emotions when I’m working beyond realism because there are no limits ... I am not presenting a statement or an essay, but a more amorphous work which allows the maker and the viewer the pleasure of discovery” (1993:73).
What pleasures of discovery does one find through Leasho Johnson’s abstraction?

By referencing Anansi, the spider character that originates in West African folklore and became ingrained in Caribbean culture through Trans-Atlantic slavery, Johnson positions Black queer intimacies within a distinctly Afro-diasporic context. Though usually referred to as male, Anansi is a shapeshifter and thus is not limited by constructions of gender or the confines of heterosexuality. Known for his wit and ability to traverse difficult situations, Anansi highlights the knowledge Black queer people develop in order to navigate complex, and sometimes dangerous worlds.

In A Street Becomes a Stage, a figure—or several—take over the canvas, ‘pon headtop’, legs spread wide and raised into the air. Or perhaps it is a multi-limbed being like Anansi the spider, one cannot be sure. There is an excess to the figure, extending beyond what a body can do. Having drawn on the visual aesthetics and choreographies of Dancehall throughout his career the work carries the essence of Dancehall culture, always carving out space for enjoyment, to ‘gwan bad’ and show off. There are always multiple happenings at a Dancehall party; overstimulated by the colours of the outfits, shining jewellery or elaborate dance moves, some things go unnoticed. It is this opportunity for opacity that Johnson looks to as openings for queer possibility, subverting dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, and class.

Johnson’s painting practice is shaped by his perspectives on technique and attention to materials. He has described the process as dismantling the notion of a painting and focusing on the relationship between layers and textures. Johnson cuts out shapes in paper before layering it onto the canvas, which informs the abstraction and movement of the paint. Washing the paper in indigo and coffee dictates how other colours emerge through the transparencies. It is a meditative process, as he follows where the watercolour paint flows, waits for it to pool and dry before drawing on top of it. His use of logwood and indigo dyes, natural materials grown in Jamaica, gesture to histories of slavery and colonialism when these crops were first harvested by enslaved Black and indigenous people in the Caribbean.

Johnson’s colour palette is drawn from the sepia tones of old family photos, imbuing the paintings with a trans-temporal quality. A carbon black is the central colour, “common and persistent, found everywhere,” he notes. In the most recent iterations of Anansi, he explores a larger scale that emphasizes the magnitude of the landscape. Each piece pulls the viewer into the intricacies and intimacies of the bush.

When asked about the relationship between abstraction and the figural form, Johnson expressed a reluctance to fall too far into unrecognizable abstraction, rather insisting on a desire to situate his work in conversation with contemporary figurative artists. Recognizing the limited and often degrading history of Black subjectivity in painting, he feels it important to prioritize the materiality of a Black body. “If I don’t actively hold the figure, I could lose it completely...I’m thinking about the longevity of the figure.”

In ...all that moved like a flood in him when we lay together at night (Anansi #12),” the figures are enveloped by plant life, a moment to be with one’s lover/s. The Anansi series prioritizes rural space, knowing that sex happens in the bush; one must study the landscape in order to traverse the dense terrain. This is Maroon knowledge, as M. NourbeSe Philip writes, “Maroonage: the coming together of the exploited physical s/place— ‘place’ and ‘space’ of the Caribbean, and the exploited s/place— ‘place’ and ‘space’ of the body. Maroonage— a coming together. Creating something new.” It is a forging of space, not solely in resistance to, but alongside histories of exploitation and trauma that do not dissipate even in the escape to the bush. Maroon knowledge also believes that something else is possible, new ways of life built or old ways undone.

As part of his inspiration for this new work, Johnson has done archival research into historical documentation of Black queer intimacy in the Caribbean. Much of this research involves imagining what has not been written, the critical fabulation Saidiya Hartman proposes to realize the different relations that took place during Trans-Atlantic slavery, but were not written down, since Black life at the time constituted property numbers in a ledger. Johnson’s envisioning of Black queer intimacy during slavery connects to the term mati, which I first learnt of through the work of Surinamese Black feminist anthropologist Gloria Wekker in her text The Politics of Passion. Citing Richard and Sally Price’s writing on the Saramaka Maroon community in Suriname, mati is described as:

Mati is a highly charged volitional relationship, usually between two men, that dates back to the Middle Passage- matis were originally ‘shipmates,’ those who had survived the journey out from Africa together; by the eighteenth century, mati was a lifelong relationship entered into only with caution and when there was strong mutual affection and admiration. (1991: 396)

To find safety in another amidst immeasurable violence, kidnapped into precarity and taken to a place unknown. Alongside this violence, Black people created intimacy and found love. They came from different countries, spoke different languages, but shared understandings that they needed each other. Claiming the right to follow desires and nurture pleasure prevailed regardless. This history is an important narrative to think about the condition of Black queer life more generally, shaped by a proximity to violence and yet invested in pleasure, seeking the promise and fulfillment of intimacy.

What lingers after a moment of violence and how does it shape the natural environment where it occurs? Blood soaked into the soil, violent memories etched into the trees. The title of the show itself is informed by Martin Monroe’s text, The Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories and, with this naming, Johnson signals the presence in the works that may not only be seen but felt, referencing the lasting impacts of slavery on the region. The ghosts of those who both succumbed to, or perpetuated violence remain, inhabiting the landscape beside those who now live in the Caribbean. They watch you, much like the portraits in the exhibition. Can we reckon with a history that cannot be resolved or will we be forever haunted?

A Deep Haunting weaves together histories of slavery, Black queer intimacy and the possibilities for opacity in Dancehall culture. In holding these complexities together, Leasho Johnson illustrates the multivalence of both the Caribbean and Black queer life.

Leasho Johnson is a Jamaican artist, born in Montego-Bay and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson mines his experience of growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming identity and the postcolonial condition. Working in a multiplicity of mediums, he immortalizes the dynamic energy of the Dancehall and engages with black stereotypes and spectrums as expressed in Jamaican/Caribbean cultural practice. His work centres on the contestations and tensions in western cultures around sexuality and seeks to explore contemporary meanings in context to historical truths.

Gervais Marsh (they/them, he/him) is a writer, artist and curator whose work is deeply invested in Black life, concepts of relationality and care. Their writing, artistic and curatorial practice is rooted in Transnational Black feminist theory and praxis. They are a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and their dissertation engages the work of several Black queer visual and performance artists who explore questions of intimacy and the human form to envision otherwise possibilities of existing in the world, while grappling with the irreconcilable violence of global structures of anti-Blackness. They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that continues to shape their understanding of self and their relationship to the world.

Exhibition: A Deep Haunting